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Is mobile e-commerce here in all its glory, or are we just at the beginning? If you follow news of sites like Gilt and Fab, you’d come away with the impression that sites are currently pulling in a large percentage of their revenue from mobile shoppers, and seeing very high conversion rates. I wanted to dig into real data to see what it said about the broader market. I looked at data from a sample of Spring Metrics' customers who ranged from very small to medium-sized, and it showed an interesting story. In the second half of this post, I’ll discuss a few ways to improve the mobile experience.

In the data below, I show aggregate numbers as well as breaking the data into different annual revenue ranges: micro sites ($1k-$50k annual revenue), mini sites ($50k-$250k annual revenue), small sites ($250k - $1mm annual revenue), and medium sites ($1mm - $10mm annual revenue). Note, this data was collected June 17th through July 17th, so it’s free of major season spikes.

Conversion Rates

In analyzing the data, I realized most sites are not seeing great conversion rates from mobile devices. The analyzed sites converted users into buyers at roughly half the rate on mobile device as compared to those who used desktop devices. The results were even more dramatic for micro sites ($1k-$50k annual revenue). The micro sites had a much more difficult time converting mobile users into buyers. This is perhaps not surprising as smaller sites have fewer resources with which to build a mobile-friendly site.

Revenue Per Conversion

How much are mobile customers spending compared to desktop customers? At an aggregate level, the numbers were closer than I expected—about a 20% difference between mobile and desktop. But again, among micro sites, we see much greater contrast, with mobile users spending about half as much as desktop users.

Total Site Revenue from Desktop vs Mobile

Finally, I wanted to break down the revenue splits between mobile and desktop users. At an aggregate level, we see an average of about 8 percent of a site's total revenue coming from mobile and 92 percent from desktop. Again we see micro sites doing much worse than this, averaging around 2.7 percent of revenue from mobile.

How to improve your mobile experience

While it’s interesting and exciting to see Gilt and Fab doing such great business on mobile, it appears the bulk of sites are still in the first stage of building their mobile conversion rates. Of course, this raises the question: What can you do to make your site’s mobile experience better? Let’s look at what Fab and Gilt are doing and what can be learned from it.

1. Build a mobile experience

Those who have smartphones know browsing on a phone is a much different experience than browsing on a computer. Your site should address these differences. On phones, people want to look at big, beautiful pictures as opposed to an array of tiny text links. They also don’t want to type or use your onsite search, and they don’t want to fill out complicated forms. Both Gilt and Fab have iPhone apps, which are a nice solution. But apps aren’t the only option. You can design a mobile version of your site that leverages the advantages of the mobile form factor.

Notice the giant product images on Fab, the large easy-to-press buttons, and the simplicity of the pages. You typically won’t see more than a dozen words on any single page. In contrast, in the second example, you see a small product image, a wall of text, and an even more intimidating wall of form fields required to make a purchase. Are your fingers cramping up at the mere sight of that? Mine are.

2. Find the right call to action

Both Gilt and Fab are built around flash sales that encourage buyers to purchase right on the spot. This plays perfectly into the habits of a mobile shopper. If they’re on the bus or train, killing time, they see a flash sale and buy right then and there.

Perhaps your site doesn’t fit the flash sale model. What can you do to leverage the emerging mobile revolution? Well, perhaps a purchase isn’t the right line of attack for you.Perhaps you simply want users to "like" you on Facebook, providing you a communication channel for future marketing. Other calls to action you might consider are incentivizing a tweet, allowing visitors to email themselves a link for later review, or simply collecting your visitor’s email address for later outreach.

Conclusion

While some sites like Fab and Gilt are doing a fantastic job with their mobile shopping experience, the vast majority of sites have a long way to go. Sites can make great strides with a few straightforward improvements: 1) making sure their design is fun and clean for mobile users and 2) thinking through what the most appropriate call to action.

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Comments
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We have seen growth in the number of mobile users vs. desktop users. Before we rebuilt our website only 1% of our traffic was coming from mobile devices. Now, it is up to about 4 % and growing. We are a mini e-commerce site in a highly competitive niche so we have to adapt quickly in order to have a fighting chance.

I have also noticed that bounce and conversion rates differ among the various types of mobile devices. For example, we have lower bounce rates and higher conversion rates from customers using Tablets. Our blackberry traffic, on the other hand, has high bounce rates and low conversions.

I am not sure what is causing the differences among devices. I did notice that no matter how much our mobile traffic goes up, the results are the same for these two devices. It will be interesting to see if this continues to be the case as mobile traffic increases.

Good info - I've seen similar numbers... Although it is important not to just look at the differences right now but how they have changed. We are seeing fast growth in hits from mobile devices - even if mobile is still not large it is becoming larger very fast. I suspect in most industries mobile will generally continue to convert worse than desktop, but the more important question (which is a little harder to answer) is: do mobile-optimized sites convert better on mobile than traditional sites do?

Interesting post. To take this study further, I think it would be good to consider people who use their mobile devices to browse products but turn to desktop PCs to actually buy the items. I think a majority of the population still don't trust using mobile devices to create purchases - it could be a security issue or simply less adeptness in operating the device. Regardless, like what you wrote, it would be best to create a mobile friendly site that's uncluttered and easy for people to use even with just one hand.

I just found your article. On my side i notice a huge difference in analytics between desktop and mobile

according to my analytics (google) i see about 2% of bounce rate one desktop that is very very good but on mobile is crazy about 55% of bounce rate. I do a clean mobile version with minimum information clean and big image i also remove maximum of loading script mobile page are also well on speed test and optimisation page site but the result is very bad when i see the bounce rate.

So maybe this happen because of mobile connection average to slow?? or i miss something ..

Jeff personally i really don't think that wireless transactions or security factors have any impact on conversion rates. And the only reason for the disagreeableness is that i really believe that the companies who handle the security factors are very well developed and structured that it is really not so simple or easy to broke their security.

As your question is really very interesting i would like to share some links which can help us to make secure online transactions.

Thank you for this article. I found it because we are running into the same thing. Our marketing team is going nuts because they are seeing missed conversions as lost sales, which is probably not true. I suspect that many mobile visits are converting later on their PCs.Getting to Jeff's point though. I don't think it is about security so much as concerns over data transfer. As a shopper, I have at times had trouble completing the checkout process on sites that are not optimized for mobile because of dropped data connection or because of the form breaking in the mobile browser. This left me with the uneasy feeling of no knowing if my credit card or paypal account was charged. I think people have learned to shop on their mobile devices and then purchase later on the PC. I am working on ways for my company to overcome this issue.Something that I find interesting is that our mobile conversion rate is better on iPad and Android devices like the Asus transformer that converts to a small laptop. I think that could mean people are more comfortable purchasing on these devices because they think of them more as laptop replacements and not mobile devices.

I mentioned this above but I also think it is about data transfer too. Connections and forms have a history of breaking on mobile devices so people like me that can't afford multiple credit card charges, are less likely to take a chance.We are redesigning our site which will include a mobile optimized template but I am interested in hearing if anyone has any feedback on simply acknowledging these concerns like if someone is using a mobile browser, having some wording that say "shop with confidence on your mobile device using our secure checkout."I'd love to do some sort of one click checkout like Amazon but that creates other problems. We don't really have the resources to handle the liability of storing credit card numbers.

Ah - glad you asked. Yes, this data does bundle tablets in with mobile. We started separating out tablets as its own category a short time ago - so very soon I hope to write a post about the differences between mobile and tablets. Keep your eyes open for that one (I'm very curious myself to see what the data will look like).

Sean - thanks for sharing the data! Yeah, that is a great example of stark contrast between desktop conversion rates and desktop mobile rates. In that case, I think the question can be asked - what are the mobile shoppers doing on the site? Are they doing comparison shopping? It may make sense to try extra means to incentivize these customers to buy with discounts, or to build a relationship with them via email, facebook, twitter, etc. Customers like these are exactly why we built Spring Metrics - people realize they have a segment that is underperforming, but then don't know what to do about it. That is what our Smart Offers / Smart Social products are all about (sorry if this comes across like an ad - you just tee'd it up for me so well :))

Shannon I had read many articles on Mobile SEO. All of them suggest us that your website should be very responsive but the most unique thing which you had describe related to responsiveness is that the difference between the usage of website on mobile device as compare to normal computers. Really i had also noticed that i also hate to read more when surfing on mobile and also rarely like to click on text links.Instead of that i prefer those websites which had very informative and interactive pages. This point had given me the whole new understanding for responsiveness in mobile websites.

Very interesting - without revealing details of specific clients, can you tell us anything about the client mix? In other words, are they concentrated in any particular verticals or types of sites (B2C e-commerce, for example)?